Mr. Heard and I put ourselves to work last week, tackling another huge project in our living room. When I say huge, I mean literally huge – like 16 feet tall and 20 hours worth of painting kinda huge. What could possibly be so large, you ask?
Our fireplace!
Here’s a shot of the fireplace the day we moved in.
Although we painted and decorated around this eyesore for a year after we bought Heardmont, the time finally came to update it for real. Here’s a shot from our recent living room redo so you can see what it the fireplace looked like just before we dis-mantled it (pun intended … hehe).
We started by taking down the décor, mantle, firebox grate, and air intake covers.
To make sure the paint would adhere to the brick, we wiped the whole thing down with wet rags and vacuumed up all the ash and dust. Then it was time to patch the sides.
The fireplace originally had strips of wood trim on either side which we discovered were covering gaping holes and rough mortar between the brick and the drywall. So before we could paint, I had to patch all those holes with my best friend DAP Fast N’ Final Lightweight Spackling.
I didn’t Google how to patch a fireplace or visit DIY websites to see if this was the best product to use. I just figured I’d use what I had, and it worked really well and was ready to paint later that day.
After the patching, it was time for the priming.
Yep, that’s really how I look during 95% of the projects you see on our blog. Sexy, no?
It may have taken 10 hours of our time, but ensuring full coverage with the primer meant 1) super fast application of the paint (Valspar’s Betsy’s Linen in Satin) 2) no brushing of the paint necessary 3) less than a gallon of actual top coat (Betsy’s Linen) used.
We noticed between the coat of primer and the paint that the trim at the top of the brick had several gaps which were much more obvious in white than they had been before. Thankfully we had some paintable caulk that Stephen used to fill in all the gaps for a much cleaner look. I decided to break the “dry time” rules by painting the caulk sooner than the package said, but I figured the caulk was for aesthetics and not for weather-proofing, so in this case we should be fine.
Finally it was time for the final coat of paint. We waited to prime and paint the hearth until the very end because we knew we would be standing on the hearth to reach higher on the fireplace throughout the process.
After letting the final coat dry, we came back in with our wall color on the sides to cover all of the patching. Here’s how it looks today!
Still on the to-do list are to paint the brassy gold grate covering the firebox a nice oiled bronze and to spray paint the four air intake grates white to make them disappear. Sadly, the temperature around these parts might not reach the required 50 degrees for spray painting for awhile, so for now we’re content to call the fireplace done.
And oh yeah! Christmas is coming! I should have a post or two coming up soon with more pictures of our festive decor.
